Danni Ashe

Danni Ashe

Danni Ashe , also Dannielle Ashe , (born January 16, 1968 in Beaufort , South Carolina ; real name since their marriage Leah Nicole Manzari ) is an American photographer and entrepreneur as well as a former softcore adult actress .

As the founder of the Danni.com or Danni's Hard Drive website , on which she initially provided her own image material, she is considered the pioneer of direct marketing of pornography over the Internet . The American youth protection commission COPA described them in 2000 as "a sexy mixture of Horatio Alger , Gypsy Rose Lee and Bill Gates ". She was inducted into their Hall of Fame by the X-Rated Critics Organization in April 2006, and by Adult Video News in January 2013 . Ashe's trademark was her large natural breasts with a bust size of 32FF and a height of 1.57 m.

Early career

Ashe began her career without graduating from high school , as a stripper in Seattle at the age of 17 . During one of her appearances, she met Bert Manzari, who she later married and was Vice President of the US-wide private cinema chain Landmark Theaters . After five years, they both moved to Los Angeles and Ashe started modeling for men's magazines and adult videos.

She also worked as a traveling stripper and dancer in various clubs in the United States. In Jacksonville (Florida) in mid-1994 she was seduced by the owner of such a club into nude appearances and the sale of nude videos. However, she did not know that this was illegal under the legal situation there. On one of the following evenings, she was watched, photographed and arrested in the act by 13 plainclothes police. After a few days in prison in convict clothing, she was released on borrowed clothes on payment of a $ 50 fine (her own had disappeared while in custody with prison guards who knew Ashe from relevant magazines). However, the lack of support from the club owner and her agent had repeatedly made her aware of how helpless and dependent on the decisions of strangers she was in this job, and she decided to quit after this humiliating experience.

Internet career

Since she had a lot of free time afterwards, she turned to the Internet in early 1995. She bought software and some books and left home with a 2400 baud - modem online. Because she had already heard that her pictures and videos were circulating in news groups like alt.sex.breast and alt.sex.movies , she immediately went to Usenet and was fascinated by the text-based communication with other users. However, she found that using a graphical browser did not seem to work for her because obviously nothing happened when clicking the links. When the newsgroups suggested that she set up a website with her own pictures, she reacted with skepticism and declined.

One day in the spring of 1995 her husband came home, installed a faster modem and showed her the new websites of his cinema chain. Only then did she realize that her apparent browser problems were actually due to the restrictions of her hardware. She immediately hired two programmers to set up her own website and offered them half the share of all the income she generated. However, the programmers preferred to pay $ 900. Ashe was not satisfied with the result, however, and hired another programmer. She wasn't much more satisfied with his work either.

Before a vacation trip to the Bahamas she bought so self-study the HTML Manual of Style by Larry Aronson and for inspiration the book Being Digital by Nicholas Negroponte . After her return, she completed the programming on her own and went online on a trial basis with her free website, danni.com, in July 1995. For the time being, however, she only passed the address on to friends under the seal of confidentiality. During a trip with her husband, however, she received a telegram from her Internet provider in New York , whose server had to be shut down because of the huge rush on danni.com . Then Danni's Hard Drive , as the site was officially called, moved to another, larger server, which was also constantly overcrowded and was therefore ambiguously referred to by Ashe as her “ hot box ”. When she started setting up a member area and charging visitors a monthly fee of $ 9.95 for it, she chose the name The HotBox for this member area . With $ 8,000 in seed capital, she founded Danni.com Inc. Until mid-1996, she remained the sole webmaster of her fast-growing site.

During the first two years of its existence, the website was one of the most viewed in the world, generating more traffic than all of Central America. The success allowed Ashe to produce and offer softcore photos and video clips not only of herself, but also of other, mostly busty models (such as Chloe Vevrier ). In 1999, her husband joined the company as Vice President. Ashe made millions of dollars a year, and her financial success even made the cover of the Wall Street Journal . She has appeared as a successful businesswoman on television shows on CBS , NBC, and ABC . In August 2000 she was heard as an expert on the subject of "adult marketing on the Internet" by the COPA Commission , a commission set up by the American Congress to protect minors . In September 2000, the Guinness Book of Records awarded her the title in the (later discontinued) category Most downloaded woman on the Internet (on a paying basis) , which led Guinness to defeat the persistent dispute with her rival Cindy Margolis over the title “ Most downloaded woman on the Internet “Solomon wanted to end by dividing it into a title for paid and one for unpaid downloads. However, in December of that year, Guinness confirmed that Ashe was the first person to hit the one billion download mark.

In 2003, Ashe's company had 50 full-time employees, a 1,500-  square- foot studio in Los Angeles, and an archive of hundreds of thousands of photos and videos totaling thousands of hours. In 2004 she sold the company to John Morisano, who gave Layne Thrasher management. In 2006, the Penthouse Media Group acquired the parts of the company that it did not yet own for $ 3 million.

After selling her company, Ashe retired from the adult entertainment business and dropped her stage name. Leah Manzari is now working as a photographer and as such is the owner of the company Manzari Photography in Sedona , Arizona, which she founded .

Honors

• XRCO Award Hall of Fame ( inducted April 2006)
• AVN Hall of Fame ( inducted January 2013)

Web links

Commons : Danni Ashe  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Danni Ashe in the Internet Movie Database (English)
• Danni Ashe in the Internet Adult Film Database (English)
• Danni Ashe: The Billion Download Woman
• Frontline : "American Porn": Interviews: Danni Ashe . PBS , 2002.
• Gabriel Spitzer: The Brains Behind the Boobs . Wired , January 28, 1999.
• Manzari Photography website

Individual evidence

1. ^ Biography in the Internet Movie Database
2. ↑ Brief description by Danni Ashe for the COPA Commission (PDF; 6 kB), possibly copied from Ashe's press release
3. ↑ Tom Ehrenfeld: Just Managing: The Naked Truth About Danni's Hard Drive . In: The Industry Standard .
4. ↑ Danni Ashe on making it in the web porn biz . ( Memento of the original from October 25, 2006 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: Media Life Magazine. March 16, 2001. 
5. ↑ Bruce Kirkland: Sex does sell at Cannes ( Memento of the original from October 9, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . jam! showbiz. 
6. ↑ ^{a b} Roger Ebert : Hard Driving a Hard Bargain ( Memento of the original from October 4, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . May 1997. 
7. ↑ ^{a b} To InnerView of Danni Ashe . AINews, Jan. 24, 2000.
8. ↑ Spiegel Wissen December 1, 2000  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
9. ↑ Michelle V. Rafter: Married To It . ( Memento of June 15, 2001 in the Internet Archive ) In: The Industry Standard. March 20, 2000.
10. ↑ Agenda of the COPA Commission for August 3rd and 4th, 2000
11. ↑ Danni Ashe - The Billion Download Woman ( Memento of the original from December 13, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
12. ↑ John Stuart: Penthouse Pays $ 3M for Danni.com  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . xbiz.com, November 1, 2006.  
13. ↑ XRCO 2005 Award Categories, Nominations and Winners ( Memento of the original from April 7, 2012 on WebCite ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
14. ↑ AVN announces 2013 Hall of Fame Inductees